Introduction: Academic Writing Resources

I organized the content and resources in this article based on my understanding and logic. I hope the structure is intuitive, and helps you lean into the cited resources and why they may be helpful for you. Every statement I make here are my own, they are subjective and you may see that as you go through the content. I make my opinions and inferences in the first person to add a human touch.

Bad scientific writing is just as “learned” as it is unlearned. Let me explain what I mean. The “unlearned” concept may be intuitive to understand: lack of knowledge in the overarching principles of scientific writing means bad scientific writing. What exactly is bad scientific writing? When I write my research artifact “badly”, it leaves my reviewer—the reader—in a worse state of understanding than before. Why does this happen?

Just like good habits, we learn bad habits every day when it comes to writing. Unfortunately, writing is tangible and the bad writing outputs stay documented. As an academic I knowingly or unknowingly want: (1) to sound learned, (2) to emulate the writing you read, (3) to willingly confuse your reader. This becomes evident in my writing.

Bottom-line: You want to unlearn bad writing. Reading research artifacts from our own fields tends to have an adverse affect (often) because most academic writing is not written keeping the readers in mind. It really is easy to dig yourself deep, even with several publications under your name.

This brings me to provide some writing resources that continue to help me reorient towards better writing habits..

BOOKS (Academic Writing)

Writing in Science & Medicine: The Investigator’s Guide to Writing for Clarity and Style

Full eBook can be purchased here: https://principalinvestigators.org/writing-in-science-medicine-the-investigators-guide-to-writing-for-clarity-and-style/

Full review of the book is here.

BOOKS (General Usage)

Dreyer’s English: Simple and easy to read for general usage. This book is handy and can be used as a reference when needed. Amazon link is here.

Full review of the book is here.

The Elements of Style by Strunk and White: The book is short and can serve as a quick reference. The book, however, is conservative in its suggestions and usage. Likely to do with the time period of the authors- the book was written more than half-decade ago with elements taken from an even earlier period. Amazon link is here.

FREE COURSES

Writing in the Sciences: A great 4-week course from Dr Kristin Sainini from Stanford University, available for free on Coursera. I will do a full review of the course in the coming weeks but for now, all I will do is recommend you take it. It will be well wroth your time.

Writing in Clinical Chemistry: This is a whole series of articles and chapters available online at the AACC website (The American Association of Clinical Chemistry). It will help you whether you are a chemistry researcher or not.

ACADEMIC ARTICLES

Here is where the fun lies! These items seem more personal and directly applicable to the writing at this stage of things.

Mathematical Writing by Donald E. Knuth

How to write a methods section of a research paper by Richard H Kallet